Knowledge Management and the ketchup conundrum

“There is another lesson in that household scene though.  Small children tend to be neophobic: once they hit two or three, they shrink from new tastes.  They would, when confronted with something strange on the plate – tuna fish, perhaps, or Brussels sprouts – want to alter the food in some way that made the unfamiliar familiar.  And so she turned to ketchup, because, alone among the condiments of the table, ketchup could deliver sweet and sour, and salty and bitter, and umami* ( a loan word from Japanese meaning pleasant savoury taste – umami is the taste that the tongue perceives distinct from the other four)”

- From “What the dog saw”

This seems quite similar to the experience we come across when we speak about Knowledge Management solutions too.  Managers having experience Business Intelligence, Analytics, Content Management, and Collaborative tools, now baulk when they are confronted with anything else that is new.  They seek to understand Knowledge Management from this familiar territory and would like to experience KM from one of these standpoints. 

So, for a KM initiative to succeed, perhaps it is important that we are able to make the unfamiliar familiar by bringing in ingredients that the neophobic manager is familiar with.  Introducing the concept of KM from a perspective of what they encounter in their daily work situation perhaps will make it more easily adopted within the organization.  The challenge then, is to find the right flavour that will appeal to the manager.

The other aspect of the ketchup is that the ingredients need to be so well blended together that none of these flavours stand out distinctly.  Well, yes, different people have different preferences for tastes, and so you have variants of the ketchup – Maggi’s hot and sweet tomato chilli sauce…which is…well different…and many other such combinations which try and cater to individual preferences.

The learning here is to bring in the appropriate blend of these tools that will allow the user to get familiar with the KM tool from a familiar territory.  So, how can knowledge be served with the right blend on top of your daily work in a manner that this allows you to benefit from the value being added, whilst still keeping you in familiar territory.

Do you see this as a possible mechanism for making knowledge management an easy-to-implement tool in organizations?

*ps: copyright acknowledged for the paragraph taken out of “What the dog saw”, Malcolm Gladwell, Back Bay Books.